The Stretchers is an unexpected delight, dropping on to the eShop without warning and perfectly timed to brighten up the long, dark winter days ahead.
Mistover follows too closely in the footsteps of a game that overshadows it in every possible way. Its combat is unspectacular and its dungeon-crawling suffers from a lack of atmosphere and a bunch of harsh gameplay systems that ensure you never really feel like you're relaxing into a rhythm, getting any sort of foothold or extracting any real or lasting joy from proceedings. If you're going to studiously pay homage to a game as expertly-crafted as Darkest Dungeon you'd best bring your A-game, and, unfortunately, in this instance, developer Krafton has failed to do that.
Dusk Diver is a solid Musuo-style hack-and-slash action game that throws you into some massive battles with a fun and flexible combat system at your disposal.
Gust has done a brilliant job of taking this long-running franchise and making it appeal to the mainstream more than ever here and, if you’ve ever been tempted to give the world of Atelier a try, this is a perfect jumping-on point.
AeternoBlade II is a mess of overly-complex mechanics and ill-fitting systems that struggles at all times to keep up with itself.
Destiny Connect: Tick-Tock Travelers is very much a "My First JRPG" type-affair.
Freedom Finger is a completely unexpected retro shooter banger. Its unique hand-drawn style, amazing soundtrack, highly offensive humour and various unique and clever gameplay mechanics all come together to deliver a beautifully anarchic ride through a madcap campaign that backs up its brash stylings with solid and challenging gameplay.
Zombieland: Double Tap - Road Trip is everything you've come to expect from a lazy movie tie-in. Its gameplay is mechanically competent but it's bland beyond belief, short, cynical and lazy. It has the most tenuous of links to the actual film it portrays and is ultimately a very basic twin-stick shooter with a tired-looking Zombieland skin tossed carelessly on top – it also costs far more money than it has any right to. If this was a free mobile game you might get an hour or two of braindead time-wasting out of it, but as an almost full price console release, it's pretty much indefensible.
Into the Dead 2 is a pretty fun, well-made auto-run zombie survival game that arrives on Switch at a ludicrous price point that makes it very hard to justify picking up.
Together, these two make for a pretty essential addition to your Switch's RPG library.
As it stands, for a budget price, this is a still a slick little twin-stick shooter that nails the basics and is well worth your time if you're a fan of the genre.
Dead By Daylight has been around for quite while now and has remained a pretty popular game on both PC and console over the years. It’s a straightforward and repetitive online affair that, if you're lucky enough to be matched with the right bunch of randoms or happen to be playing a custom match with friends, can deliver the goods in terms of frights and tension from time to time. However, it has also always been a pretty clunky affair, a fact which is amplified further here by the noticeable graphical downgrade, laggy menus and the exclusion of a bunch of DLC that we really feel should have been included for the steep asking price.
Fight’N Rage arrives on Switch and immediately positions itself as one of the must-own action games on Nintendo’s console.
Devil May Cry 2 is quite rightly regarded as a misstep for the now storied franchise; a confused and oddly bland game with a nonsensical story, boring level design, terrible enemy AI and a central protagonist who has seriously lost his mojo. There's some fun to be had here and there by virtue of the fact it is a Devil May Cry game; that signature combat still intact, despite the fact it never really attempts to put your skills to the test. Still, there's no escaping the reality that this is one entry in the series you can absolutely skip without feeling like you missed anything. Roll on Devil May Cry 3.
Contra: Rogue Corps has some good ideas.
Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast has an opening five chapters that will test your patience to its absolute limit. In some ways, this is down to its age and in others it's just bad design coupled with the odd decision to hold back the game’s best aspects for such a long stretch. This poor pacing is the one thing standing in the way of us giving this a hearty recommendation. However, If you think you’ve got the fortitude to push on through to the good stuff – a trial worthy of Yoda himself – you’ll be handsomely rewarded with some top-notch Star Wars action.
Habroxia is a pretty bland and curiously straightforward little shmup with nothing about it that stands out as being worth recommending.
This beautiful Switch remake rebuilds all of this from the ground up in fine style. It adds modern conveniences, a dungeon creator, amiibo support and lots of little quality of life improvements whilst infusing every single square inch of Koholint – every secret passage, Piranha, Pokey and Pig Warrior – with a level of detail and depth that totally reinvigorates both its timeless story and classic Zelda gameplay for a whole new generation of gamers.
Gun Gun Pixies is a bad game. It’s a terrible third-person shooter, a clunky platformer and an incompetent visual novel, all wrapped up in an embarrassingly puerile attempt at titillation.
From its opening moments upon a prison ship bound for Fort Joy to non-stop adventures that take you across the high seas to the Reaper’s Coast, Nameless Isle and beyond, Divinity: Original Sin 2 simply dazzles.